I have trouble reading a book when I don't really like the central characters. The two central characters of this book weren't people I could get in to. They share a love for a specific type of music. So far so good. They are constantly searching for recordings, usually 78's of 1920s Black performers. One of the two, Carter, comes from a wealthy family. We see him as the black sheep who actively tries to keep his background under cover so he doesn't damage the family's reputation. The other, Seth, has no such economic base and is sucked into the slipstream of the other's well-funded base.

They scour used record stores searching for the rare gems they might discover. But to get the really rare items collectors look to other collectors who might be willing to part with one of the rare ones, or occasionally are willing to sell their entire collections, for a price. It's a very small fraternity so most collectors are well known to the others, In all instances, money talks. But it's also a world where drugs are part of the scene. Often it's hard to tell whether what is being related is what they are actually experiencing or part of a drug induced hallucination. And rumors abound. Is it true that a certain performer actually made a recording with some obscure, long forgotten label? Conspiracies run rampant. And then there are deep fakes. Music made to sound as if they were recorded long ago, scratches and all. That's where the technological skills of Seth, the hanger on, adds something to the mix.

Carter has a supportive Sister but the power in the family is with their brother who is all in with the family's fortune in defense contracting. He sees Carter as a threat and wants him kept on as short a leash as possible. Naturally trouble brews. Seth is introduced to the family's enormous wealth by attending an event at the family's estate in the Virginia hills. Things run their course and tragedy results. All the elements are there. Where will Seth come out of all of this. That's what makes this a story. Interesting reading but not high on my list. ( )

Supernaturalism and blues music go together like neon lights and strip clubs. Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil, after all, and the exact details of much of both are murky, dark, and a touch exotic. So a novel about a dead bluesman whose personal history is exceedingly hazy reaching out from the past is not so surprising; nor, separately, is making it into a very contemporary horror genre story that feels exactly of this moment, reckoning with America’s deeply racist past and how that reality continues to shape how things are today.

Unfortunately the story gets too far gone in its hallucinatory melange of past and present and strays over the line into incoherentness, but an interesting failure at least has the interesting part going for it. ( )

A pretty good horror novel about the fetishization and appropriation of Black music. It covers a lot of similar ground as John Hornor Jacobs' novella My Heart Struck Sorrow, one of my favorite horror reads, though subject of American racism is the subject here rather than one element of many. The resolution of the plot felt earned, and the writing itself was satisfying, though the middle third or so took a turn for the incoherent. Unlike in many horror narratives where the horror elements and the "real" thing the horror represents undermine each other, the supernatural and the natural worked cohesively together. Satisfying. ( )

Surrealist tale of two white music producers, one a collector and the other an engineer, who record a faux “blues track,” complete with crackles and hisses, but find out later it is a real song by an old-time forgotten black blues musician. This finding leads to a series of events that reflect the racist history of America by telling the story of a prominent family that has grown its wealth from the seeds of racial intolerance and greed. The protagonist is a good friend of one of the younger family members who has renounced his family’s legacy.

The first half is a relatively straight-forward tale of obsessively collecting old blues records and recording street noises. The second half is full of time shifts, a melding together of past and present, and illusory specters (which could be a by-product of mental illness). This is one of those books where I can appreciate the literary artistry, but the supernatural portion of the book is not something that generally appeals to me. I found it jarring to the flow of the narrative to try to figure out if the events being described are occurring in the current time to the protagonist or happened in the past to the blues musician. I think this book will appeal to those that can just “go with the flow” and not constantly try to figure it out.

I liked this book. It is very creative, and the writing is brilliant. I enjoyed first half and found the overall message relevant. It reminds us that behind each one of those old blues recordings is a personal story of heartache, suffering, poverty, and injustice.

“When you listen to an old record, there can be no illusion that you are present at a performance. You are listening through a gray drizzle of static, a sound like rain. You can never forget how far away you are. You always hear it, the sound of distance in time. But what is the connection between the listener and the musician? Does it matter that one of you is alive and one is dead? And which is which?” ( )

Ghost Voices

In human history, voices precluded from speaking, not just lost but knowingly suppressed before anyone can hear them, number in the millions. Charlie Shaw, the pivotal character in Hari Kunzru White Tears, a musician who at first doesn’t exist, then exists as the product of Seth’s and Carter’s imaginations, and finally as a ghost voice reaching out over the years to haunt Seth, and to be heard, finally, can be read as the allegorical representation of these many millions who were repressed by others. You’re left to wonder what the untold lost voices might have said about their own oppression, as does Charlie about his, or what they might have contributed, as Charlie might have to the evolution of the Blues.

Kunzru’s novel opens as a mystery, the mystery of whom the seemingly invented Charlie Shaw was. Seth, something of an amateur sound archeologist, excavating the sounds and voices around him, hears a black chess player in Washington Square sing “Believe I buy a graveyard of my own/Believe I buy me a graveyard of my own/Put my enemies all down in the ground,” the first of five tercets. When Carter, a wealthy guy whom Seth met in art school who likes old-time analog sound and enjoys audibly antiquing recordings, pushes Seth to create a 78rpm version of the song, along with an authentic looking shellac plate and label, they set in motion a chain of events that, in the end, transcend the boundaries of time.

A mysterious collector appears to inform them that Charlie Shaw was real, an early 20th century musical pioneer, and their record must be the missing, and thus very rare, platter recorded at the Saint James Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi in the Twenties. What’s more, he claims it is the very recording sought decades earlier by his collector mentor, Chester Bly, the quest for which drove the man mad. Seth, after Carter turns up beaten into insensibility and in something of a sexually inspired puerile alliance with Leonie, Carter’s sister, retraces Bly’s quest. The consequences not only prove deadly, but the endeavor opens Seth to a sort of possession by the spirit of Charlie Shaw. In this state, he traverses time, often times in a single sentence, in which Carter’s family, the Wallaces, play a prominent part in the art of repression that grows and multiplies into a giant conglomerate, at the heart of which is correctional management, that is, private prisons.

White Tears is a novel that begins conventionally then dashes headlong into an impressionistic exploration of repression and racism, with a side trip into the proclivities of the one-percent. ( )